“Oh shit.”
“I’m in the Basement right now. I’m closing in. So be ready to move as soon as I call.”
“Wait … there’s something else on my end.” She sank down below the dashboard, resting on the floor of the car “I think someone might be tracking me.”
“Tracking how?”
“Following me,” she said, nearly whispering. “I need you to do an overview in ghost.”
“I don’t know where you are.”
“Right. I’m just across from …” She peeked up over the window line long enough to see the church signage obscured by teenagers in cardboard costumes. “Shit, um …”
“Terri, breathe. Upper-left-hand corner. You’re wearing shades.”
“Okay.” She exhaled, “Okay.”
“Ping your location and flip it to me. Upper-left corner.”
She did this. “Okay.”
“Gimme a moment,” Carla said.
Squatting now on the floor of this car, she understood that this was the lowest possible station in the depths of depression. No home, no safe haven, hiding in the bottom of a motionless vehicle. She made herself remove her pistol, placing it on her lap, staring at this object and for a moment seeing it as an unknown artifact, the chemicals of panic and inertia buffeting her into confusion. Slowly, tentatively, she reached up to ping the car’s control box and slide this down to her level, terrified of getting shot while executing a getaway, terrified of getting executed herself.
Carla laughed. “Yeah, you’re surrounded, alright.”
She froze, was frozen, caught in the finality of the cruel laugh: the only person she could trust had been against her all along.
“I’m seeing the full roster of news-hawks and knuckleheads: Tina Bravo, Shep Lyra, Kofi Agyeman, Pedro Stelter from LA Doings …”
“Reporters.”
“You’re a celeb. I guess somebody grabbed your face on the way out of the building. I should’ve thought of that.”
She rose to sit on one of the seats, blood thudding, livid in embarrassment, seeing the group of familiar faces milling around on the sidewalk, conferring with each other, nobody veering too close to the car.
“Why aren’t they approaching? I’d think they’d want footage of me cowering.”
“If the story is you had a hand in Nuestro Quintiglio’s death, then, yeah, that makes sense.”
“Or they actually believe I’m on the hunt for reporters.”
“Back to my own hunt,” Carla said. “I’ll call.”
She had the car pull out, seeing Kofi and a few more young go-getters jump in their own waiting cars to give pursuit, as if she were some bygone starlet fleeing the paparazzi. She’d heard of this happening before, journalists hunting cops, although the more prudent course would’ve been to track a car with drones and catch up on the other side. Maybe they were doing that as well. As evasion, she dropped herself off at the Toluca workstation, the closest with two street entrances, striding through the building before any coworkers could snipe at her, out the back door, crossing the fifteen feet of pavement to the next waiting car as if it were a perp walk, covering her head with her jacket with one hand, her mouth and nose with the other.
Carla called on the freeway.
“Tejada, Gorilla man, was shot by … this lady.” A display box materialized over the dashboard, framing a mousy brunette. “Paula Pineda. No priors, lives fancy, at least according to her listed street address. Young. As best I can tell, she’s still with us.”
Eight minutes later, the car parked itself on a deserted residential side street in the Hollywood Hills, next to an aquatint-tiled wall. The silence here seemed meaningful, only the fronds of one palm tree fluttering high overhead, like the tarp-covered shopping carts she’d seen the day before. She was about to dial Carla when she realized they’d never disconnected.
“I’m here, but there’s a two-car garage coming straight out of the side of the hill, meaning there’s a private entrance from inside the house. Anyone could come or go and I’d have no way of knowing.”
“This has to be your call,” Carla agreed. “If I do backup, you’re back in the system and back to being an active target. If you go in solo, you’re a target without backup.”
Terri ran a finger through her hair, participant in and punchline of a vast conspiracy. Cosmic joke: creeping chaos.
“I’m going in on my own.”
“Okay. Obviously I’ll corroborate you on Exigent Circumstances. Keep your PanOpts on your person but turned off. Call me if you need the cavalry.”
“Yeah.”
She made a sucking sound through her teeth as the alert box for her SwiftWhisper account blinked on and off. When opened, it showed all the overhead footage Carla could get of the property. It was a decent spread: main house, side wing, some sort of small atrium, nice pool, everything bordered with thick walls of shrubbery and treeline. The place was rich, but not crazy person rich. More importantly, there were no toys or swing sets or other evidence of children, which was good. Or at least as good could be in this situation, essentially an action that would require official approval in hindsight.
Heart knocking, she glanced at the owner information long enough to register that the property didn’t belong to Paula Pineda. Of all the seven perps in this chain of death, Pineda was by far the least threatening, a slender, pale wisp of a twenty-two-year-old probably smaller than even Stacy Santos. Although Terri had to remind herself that every person in the chain was just as lethal as the Browning HP they brandished. She pictured this gun now, somewhere inside the posh grounds, a wasp she didn’t want to sting her. Still, the geometry of one gun was preferable to another ambush.
The map showed a grade in the landscaping, to the right of the front entrance and slightly out of view from the street. The driveway to the next house was almost entirely out of sight from this angle, but a place like this would probably have a contract with some rapid-response security firm. If someone called the cops, she’d just have to improv.
She crossed to the gate, sidestepped into foliage, hoisted herself over the wall, and scrambled up an incline of dense landscaping, emerging next to the swimming pool. A cleaning machine sat deactivated at the bottom of the water, the curve of its hose forming a huge, pool-sized question mark, rising in three dimensions and then going flat with the distortion of the surface. Some bouncy bebop played distantly, and Terri put a hand to her chest, feeling her heart slam with illicit knowledge, the old “Open sesame” of her profession placing her somewhere she should not be.
The muted jazz suddenly swelled, and through a picture window she saw someone emerge from the sliding door just around the corner, the effect similar to seeing through the wall with her PanOpts. For the second time in less than two days, she drew her gun. The small figure rounded the corner like a penitent monk, almost entirely shrouded in an oversized bathrobe.
“LAPD! Hands! Let me see your hands!”
The stranger stopped, the sides of the hood flopped in wild confusion, and even when knobby, blue-veined hands emerged from the sleeves and revealed the face of an elderly woman, Terri was so primed to see Paula Pineda that she blurted another command on momentum-primed autopilot, the Tourette’s of control.
“Police! Against the wall! Now!”
The old woman saw her and gasped once, a pained half squeak, tottering backward and connecting hard with the stucco wall, as if the entire property had just been yanked out from under her. Terri raced clockwise around the swimming pool between them, thinking there was no way she’d reach the woman in time, hoping that she’d at least fall to one side or another and not stagger face down into the pool.
And yet she did reach the old woman in time, making it to support one frail elbow as she slid around her, hooking a light metal lawn chair with her foot and sliding it across the patio concrete with a loud jangle. The old woman sat and Terri reholstered her gun, trying to remember where the medical apps were in PanOpt, trying to decide if she should pull
them out and look, instead producing her badge from its jacket pocket.
“Did you hit your head? On the wall?”
The old woman raised one hand and cleared her throat with some effort, half-whispering, “I’ll be okay,” with a phlegmy sizzle. From this close, Terri saw that the woman was older than she would have guessed from the way she’d walked out the door, mideighties at least, although a well-tended octogenarian, with skin less sun-damaged than Terri’s own.
“Okay. I’m okay,” the woman said, seeming to calm herself. “You’re a cop. Okay.”
“I need to locate Paula Pineda. This is her residence?”
“No, it’s my residence. I’m Rose. I own this house.”
“Is Paula your daughter? Or …”
“She’s my assistant. Oh my,” the woman made eye contact with Terri now, her eyes focused and clear.
“Is Paula in some sort of trouble?”
“I’m not sure, ma’am. But I’ll need to speak with her immediately. Is she here?”
“I … I’m not sure if she’s here or not. She stays here half the week, in the back bedroom.” Then, to herself, she added, “Oh no.”
“Do I have your permission to search the premises?” Terri didn’t like asking a question she didn’t need to, but it seemed easier than explaining the legality of what she was doing, and she needed to make sure she could leave the owner where she was.
Rose waved a hand dismissively and looked down to the ground, seeming to catch her breath all over again. Not sure what else to say, Terri mumbled, “Stay right here,” drawing her gun again and letting herself in through the sliding door.
This was to be a sweep, not a search, the legal distinction between the two bright and unequivocal. Although without her PanOpts recording, she realized, there was freedom to do nearly anything she wanted. Terri thought of all those coppers from the Thin Man movies, striding through private doors with barely a grunt. Exigency upon exigency. At least old-timey cops didn’t have to worry about house macros.
The layout was both smaller and also far more sumptuous than expected, the decor a pitch-perfect mix of rounded glass and Southwest mission style, the place spotless, Terri instinctually thinking Rich Widow. After sweeping the two bedrooms and each bedroom’s separate bathroom, the closets, kitchen, den, and foyer, she crossed back into the small sitting room she’d entered in and raised her eyebrows in appreciation.
Back outside, Rose sat curled in worry, her huge-knuckled hands clutched together.
“Did you find her?”
“No. She’s not here. This is very important. Do you have any idea where she would be right now?”
“Right now. What day is today?”
Terri had to think about this for a moment. “Sunday.”
“Oh! Sunday she’s at the market!”
“Market … which market?”
“Well, today it could be the supermarket, or … oh! I know! The one with all the fish!”
“The one with the fish. The Zuma fish market?”
“Yes!” Her face clouded for a moment. “Yes, I think she would have to be.” Rose was staring at Terri’s hand, at the gun.
“Good,” she said, reholstering her weapon and producing the business card whose phone number led to her ghostly Dupe, telling everyone she had the flu somewhere.
“Thank you for your assistance.”
“I hope she isn’t in trouble.”
“That makes two of us.”
As she made her way back down to the car, a vision came to Terri with forceful clarity: chuck the badge and the shades in the pool and start over somewhere far away.
Back on the freeway, the car synced itself with another vehicle whose thudding bass rattled the windows in 4/4 rhythm. She closed her eyes, trying to focus, to place herself ahead of the urgency instead of behind it, even as the car raced toward her destination, its sheer acceleration giving the opposite impression, that she was late for a deadline that may or may not have already expired.
As she did in all moments of calm sandwiched by commotion, she tried to recap, to focus on the particulars of what had happened, to sift for clues. Yesterday’s conversation with Zack in front of City Hall—the stubbornly disorienting weirdness of it—stayed with her. She called Carla in audio, on the civilian shades, filling her in on the scene at the house and the subsequent race to the Zuma fish mart.
“Listen. Also. Something weird is bugging me about my conversation with Zack yesterday afternoon.”
“What’s that?”
“I made mention of this thing with his dog. It’s this … it’s an in-joke we’ve bounced around for years. But yesterday he acted like he didn’t know what I was talking about.”
“If the guy set you up, it stands to figure he’d probably mess with you. Especially in the call where he’s verifying that you’re still alive.”
“Maybe. But I don’t think that was it. It was just an afterthought, like he had no clue what I was talking about.”
“So what do you think happened?”
“I think maybe Zack isn’t Zack. Maybe someone is impersonating him. Impersonating his VT. If someone could fake my Dupe, then …”
“Wait. Wait, wait, wait, back up. Yeah, the Dupe thing is … I don’t know what. But cracking Zack’s VT is an entirely different universe …”
“But what about those bypasses you told me about? The bank robbery in Tarzana where the robbers faked the outgoing call?”
“That was ten years ago. Those bypasses are museum pieces. Literally. We have them locked up in a display case. When the chief of police from Tokyo or Mexico City visits, that’s one of the things we pull out for them to ooh and ah over. It’s like showing them OJ Simpson or Black Dahlia stuff. It’s historical. No one makes bypasses now, they’re rarer than, I don’t know … they’re beyond rare. And now you’re saying someone’s got two of these, one they used on you—although I don’t even know how that could be done without you knowing about it—and one used on Zack. It’s crazy.”
“Carla, this whole thing is crazy.”
“Point taken. I guess Zack’s identity would be easy enough to verify. Maybe you should call back, give him twenty questions.”
“I’m going to be there in a few minutes. Right now, every cell in my body is focused on getting this Pineda person. Which, yeah, she hasn’t shown up in the Basement, right?”
“Not yet. But if she came out of an enclosed garage, she could easily drive all the way out there and go shopping without detection. Especially the way that place is set up.”
“So that seems like one sign toward her being there.”
“How so?”
Terri realized she’d already arrived at the Fish Mart’s long sandy parking area. “There aren’t many public places with the kinds of security barriers they have in Zuma.”
“Good point. Keep me posted. I’ll do likewise.”
In terms of surveillance, the tent-covered Fish Mart was the same thing as the Santos community, a space outside regular civic detection, where the luxury of anonymity came built into the price. For police purposes, zones like the Zuma Fish Mart posed as much of a pain in the ass as the Swap Meet. Carla had two drones circling far overhead. Both would be of as much use to Terri as the seagulls even farther overhead, swooping in larger circles and then dipping to the nearby waves in sequence.
Without PanOpt’s guidance, a pause was necessary to take in the visual disorder. She’d never been here before, and hadn’t expected such tightly packed hustle and bustle. Nearby, an oyster bar was done up like a miniature Route 66 diner, all chrome and Formica. Next to this, huge bins of ice held cod and mackerel and Alaskan King Crabs, each one costing two months’ salary for a ten-year cop. Terri walked past fat, triangular slabs of tuna, so pink they resembled marbled watermelon, and stacks of smaller fish, red and white, their little eyes gaping in shock, the expression of nearly every murder victim she’d ever seen. That pungent smell—for most of human history a gross, working-class odor—was now t
he aroma of sheer luxury. It’d been years since she’d even tasted an actual fish. Guards stood at every intersection, smiling but packing sidearms.
Terri set out, scanning the crowd, enduring quick stares and murmurs, everyone knowing her profession, seeing she couldn’t see theirs in return. She assumed many of the older clientele here—her age and up—were parents of kids like Stacy Santos, people who sent their offspring to expensive colleges and probably tutted with distaste when they saw displays like the cardboard shantytown at UCPD. But in their private conversations, most of these people probably agreed with the general sentiment, that cops serially abused the poor refugees in their care, like the cruel owners of an orphanage. This perceived critique stung her far more than the usual cop bashing, being both vague and impossible to refute.
Many of the younger adults here were most likely personal assistants. They milled in the aisles, consulting invisible lists of criteria, searching for the perfect cut, or the unique gift. One mobbed booth sold jars of honey as an investment. There’d been huge strides in the manufacture of fake bees, competing armies made in non-compatible formats, each capable of delivering pollen in the contingency that the real ones finally died out. After everything had died, she supposed, these fake bees could still be buzzing around the planet, able to fix each other and build new bees, needing only sunlight to thrive. Maybe someday there’d be fake fish. She squinted and glanced up, realizing that overhead speakers actually played “Ode to Joy” at a soft volume.
Terri arrayed four publicly available face-recognition apps to work over each other, almost instantly regretting her choice. A jumble of name boxes blossomed, quickly filling her visual field, more than half of them commercial bylines opening their own bulbous balloons and animations. She hissed, halting in the middle of the aisle, trying to adjust the parameters for each app as two clashing jingles for dating services blared over each other. She pulled off the disposable EyePhones, wondering, half seriously, if she’d have more luck finding Paula Pineda if she tried to arrange a hookup.
Pineda: why would she come here? Terri walked without shades, trying to see this market from her perp’s perspective. Paula was like the others. She’d been terrified into killing another human being. So she would have been left doubly traumatized, once from the shooting, once from whatever made her shoot. Paula would also want to continue with daily routines, both out of a need to reenter her normal life—to make herself believe it’d all been something close to a horrible dream—and a desire to appear as normal as possible. She’d probably be scared of capture, so it would seem advantageous to adhere as close as possible to normal routines, not knowing that those routines would make her that much easier a target.
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